My summer job in college was a steel mill, so we had to watch the same four safety videos every year. One was basically a really bad actor saying “I don’t have time for safety!” then a Good Samaritan type stopping before he jammed his head in a machine press or grabbed a power line, followed by “Wow! Safety really is important!” I was always cheering for the dude to grab the power line so there was more excitement. Even the video about the guy who didn’t turn his truck off and had a gas leak hit the engine, which burned 90 of his body was boring. The story was horrific and he went into pained detail about the burn unit, but he talked so calmly, three of five people fell asleep in my first training day. Of course, we were all college students, so being hungover didn’t help.
I had to watch harassment videos recently. The ironic thing is that my manager, regional manager, regional VP and national sales manager are all women and no one is harassing this dad bod. The videos were pretty bad and they even had a game at the end, so they tried, they really did. I just realized that as ridiculous as some of it was, it meant that someone did the things in the videos.
As I was watching, I was told not to make sexually explicit gestures to my co-workers. Guess no more Degeneration X crotch taunts at the coffee pot! I have a picture in my head of the guy doing those by the way and he looks exactly like what you’re thinking. They also had a point of view video of a man telling another man, “It’s great that we have a sales dinner, but you and your partner are going to ruin the boy girl, boy girl seating arrangement.” I realized someone probably actually said that too. What adult says boy girl to another human adult and who is really upset by that? “Well, I’m not a homophobe, but I have crippling OCD and I demand gender balance at my dinner table.” They also covered age discrimination, which is good, because I haven’t watched Logan’s Run in a while and I might make a wrong turn heading for the exit.